Monday, March 14, 2016

WHEN DOES AN ASSEMBLY BECOME A MOB

GROUP PERSONALITIES

In the
military I was a SERE (survival, evasion, resistance and escape) instructor,
and as part of our program we studied how individual prisoners and prisoners as
a group behaved in captivity – this included interviewing our own U.S.
prisoners of war that had escaped or were released in Vietnam.

This
characterizing of people vs group behavior can carry over to any assembly of
people. As individuals people are
restrained, but as they become a part of an assembly or group, individuals tend
to take on the character of the group personality.

The seventy-two-year-old
man that punched the young black man at the Trump rally would never have considered
doing that if he and the young man were in a room by themselves. The man was not acting as an individual, he
was acting as a bonded part of a larger personality – the personality of the Trump
assembly at that venue.

Groups of
people, assemblies, mobs or whatever you would like to call them, unify to take
on the persona of a single personality; and if you can identify the
characteristics of the group personality, you can understand its personality
traits, and even manipulate it.

But, unlike more
stable people, most mobs are Schizophrenic: capable of abnormal social behavior
and failure to understand reality. This volatile
group personality easily buys into false beliefs and unclear or confused
thinking of situations.

The group
personality of the Trump rallies is a low intelligent, angry, zealous, bigoted
group personality that is easy manipulated by a charismatic leader;

but, one capable of losing self-control and become a mindless mob without direction.

There are
other people at the Trump rallies with more reserve, but they are marginalized
because of the temperament created by Trump.
If the extremist were decried by their leader the more reasonable personality could assert itself, though the
overall characteristics of the group would not have change.

Maybe I am over thinking this: what we all need is a glass of wine, a good fuck and a nap.

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